The New Zealand Correspondence School is a large, state-funded, national institution teaching at preschool and elementary-secondary school levels. Like the regular education system, it long has been tightly controlled, with a national syllabus, national grading and examinations, and national guidelines for interpretation of the syllabus. The school teaches a wide variety of students with special needs and includes student support systems such as extracurricular activities, camps, seminars, visiting teachers, and school publications. The school maintains strong links between teacher and parent through its expertise in teaching through an intermediary, such as a teacher in the local school, who mediates between the distance education institution and the student. Since it has a wide range of curriculum offerings, its varied teaching methods include audiovisual media, teleconferencing, kits, and project work. The school has evolved a quality management system that provides expert evaluation in course planning, writing, production, and management. The school has become expert at meeting a variety of student needs while serving large groups of students. Some examples of this diversity of needs include students who are enrolled because of distance, itinerancy, medical problems, psychological problems, or because they are overseas. In meeting these students' needs, the school considers provision of courses for nonliterate learners, student support, choice of appropriate course structure, consideration of tutor time management, and choice of an appropriate media mix. The school demonstrates that it is possible for a distance education institution to contribute in a positive and effective way toward meeting national education goals. (KC)